Housing and Regeneration Bill

I do not begrudge the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, her nanosecond of glory in the slightest. She is perfectly welcome to open the batting if she wants to. I had a meeting this morning with the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for which I am grateful. I explained to her, I hope, that this arose in the Joint Committee on Human Rights out of a case that was brought before the courts over a lady who was being looked after in private healthcare. In the YL case, because her care was provided privately, it did not count as a public function. Up until then, everyone had assumed that the Human Rights Act was supposed to cover anything that was providing a public function. The difficulty here for me is that if landlord and tenant is not a public function, the Human Rights Act does not apply to the duties. If it is a public function—I am most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Faulkner, who drew this to my attention—when in Clause 88(2) under ““Fundamental Objectives”” there is objective 1, "““to encourage and support a supply of well-managed social housing, of appropriate quality, sufficient to meet reasonable demands””," that strikes me as a public function that is being imposed on the regulator to provide social housing, either publicly or privately owned. Therefore, it seems to me that a public function performance is needed. I am also told that there is a Treasury rule and that the moment the public function is admitted, it will come under Treasury rules for borrowing. I simply cannot believe that. Is the Minister seriously saying that if the YL case on social housing is reversed then a small company taking out a mortgage to provide social care housing will be subject to Treasury rules? Of course it will not. What is the PFI if it is not designed solely to keep every piece of borrowing off the Treasury books? Some of us have called that ““Enron accounting”” before now. This is an excuse produced to say that it is a bad idea. The noble Baroness told me this morning—I am sure that she will tell the Committee, too—that the Ministry of Justice is looking into this whole affair. I quite accept that to try to fix the particular YL problem in one Bill may not be the right way to do it. It is a problem that must be brought to the attention of Ministers. That was the view of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which considered the matter in a certain amount of detail. We are advised by some clever lawyers who know what they are talking about, and we thought it appropriate to bring this to the Committee’s attention and table an amendment, so I have great pleasure in supporting the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee.